I Give Thanks

Today and everyday I give thanks for all that has been given me. I thank God, whoever or whatever that might be, for giving me life - for the opportunity to live and love on this beautiful planet Earth.

Yesterday I saw a sunset that was more beautiful than any painting ever created – a breathtaking quilt pattern of rose-pink clouds that blanketed the western sky with peace and harmony. How could anyone see this and not realize that our ability to see beauty and our ability to love could only have come from the source of life we refer to as God.

I give thanks for my health and for the health and well-being of my family and friends.

Even though there are days I suffer pain and discomfort as I age I am thankful for all the days and years gone before that I have lived free of any serious health problems or disease. When I look around and see how others have suffered I feel that I have been undeservedly blessed and protected – and, even though I was hit with the biggest personal tragedy I can imagine when I lost my wife Margaret Ann, I don’t believe God has singled me or any group of people out for special treatment – or for punishment. I don’t believe God operates as a man would, bestowing gifts and favor on those who most please him while punishing others who disappoint him. If that were the case then there are seemingly blessed people we all know who would have been struck down many years ago. Genetics apparently play a large part in determining how long we live, what disease might befall us and how we die - it's not God inserting his will. A lot of it is a roll of the genetic dice - the rest is the life style we choose. Smoker's glibly say "we all have to die of something", so they choose smoking as a way of life but with that choice sadly comes a way of death. So it is with the other addictive lifestyles of choice, i.e. food, drugs.

I don’t believe that a supreme being, i.e. God, protects me and my family above those who are innocent victims of war, vicious crime or unfortunate accident. To do so would be an arrogant affront to the highest power in the universe. God does not decide who lives and dies, not in an interpersonal way. I believe the same as Einstein who stated, “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

I give thanks that I have not become consumed by desire and that I do not worship the things of this world.

I do not give thanks for any of the material possessions I have at my disposal for I realize any desire for wealth and material possessions is antithetical to any professed belief in God and lacks a reverence for God’s creation. Those who know and love God should not pray for wealth and power over others. We have become confused when we think that God sanctions the depletion of the earth’s resources and destruction of the earth’s environment in the name of economic growth and opportunity for material wealth.

Our understanding of God has become corrupt if we think God welcomes the mass production and distribution of trinkets and gadgets of no intrinsic worth, and the technology to develop greater weapons of war, worldwide communications networks and electronic devices that support and expand this mad rush to destruction.

Sadly, we have become a world predicated on the growth and multiplication of desire, exactly the thing that the Buddha warned against.

I can’t imagine a God that is orchestrating and supporting global economics that involve crimes against humanity and the environment by those intent on gaining wealth and power at any expense, all this done under the pretense of advancing civilization and fulfilling God’s promise to man.

Also I have trouble with “God’s promise to man”. Why would an all-knowing, omnipotent God promise lowly man anything? If God made a promise to any of his creations I would think his first promise would be to those that offend him the least – and that would send man to the back of the line.

Man has searched for the meaning of life since we human animals were first capable of discursive thought. We have properly reasoned there must be something greater than us, some grand plan or intended consequence of our being. No one has found the answer that can satisfy our innate need and longing to know.

Assuming man has a purpose greater than the other creatures, which is highly suspect, I suggest that he mimic his fellow creatures by leaving the smallest footprint on the earth as possible. To honor God we should commit no violence or act of hate, we should love and respect our fellow creatures and the earth with a passion unrivaled by any great artist, and through those and other right-actions we should write our only epitaph on the hearts and minds of those we come to know and those we befriend during our journey here on earth. Mark Twain understood man better than perhaps any literary genius the world has ever produced. Mr. Clemens observed the following: "When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." "The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot." "Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat." And, although I couldn’t find the quote, I recall that Mark Twain said he read in the newspaper it was determined that of all the animal species to have ever existed on earth, man is the most intelligent – and guess who it was that determined that ?, Twain mused.

Where do we go from here?

I believe when the body dies it’s gone forever and is not resurrected in some three dimensional purified state of perfection. It is so imperfect and poorly designed who would want to occupy it for eternity? A benevolent and loving God would at least give us a chance to choose some other body or form.

The idea that God created man in his image is an insult to God and the most obscene example of our insidious anthropomorphic effort to create God in our image. We don’t give God much credit for intelligence and creative ability by this self indulgent and obnoxious, anthropocentric claim. Since we allow that God can think and reason with a greater power than any living thing, that alone disproves the notion. Why would an all-powerful and omniscient God choose the unpleasant, unsightly, and ungainly body of man to travel about in? Only man would saddle God with human qualities which by nature are so physically crude and easily corruptible when compared to the rest of God’s creation.

Other members of the animal kingdom are much more perfected than man. The skunk has qualities that allow them to fill their environmental niche much more perfectly than man could ever dream of filling his. Indeed so does almost every other form of animal and biological life. Only man does not contribute to the paradisiacal environment God so graciously created for all creatures of this earth. Other animals live in harmony with the earth’s environment and adapt to it in a way which benefits and restores it while man defiles and destroys it. You have to question why any omnipotent entity, the one man proposes is the creator of all that exists, would unleash an animal as vile and destructive as man on such a beautiful work of art and energy as the earth and the universe.

If in fact there is life after death (which I consider most unlikely in the manner that most theologians propose), I seriously doubt any version of these terra firma adapted physical bodies we now occupy and the mental ability that is attributable to the function of our brains will follow us. More likely, the spiritual essence that seems to dwell in each of us, without the encumbrance of man’s corruptive ego, is all that will survive.

At least that is what I reasonably expect given all that I have read on the subject written by those acknowledged to be the greatest minds in all of man’s history.

Keep this in mind, our ability to reason in the manner that we do is a system developed by man and is structured by use of words developed to communicate and describe thoughts and by use of a numerical system in the form of numbers and equations assigned to observations that can be replicated – and to theories based upon these observations. What we refer to as knowledge, which is only man’s experience of his/her environment is constantly growing and transforming.

And, to add to the complexity of this amazing world we live in, we must never forget that everything is constructed of atoms swirling and colliding together, constantly in motion. In one sense, the floor we stand on is no more solid than the air we breathe and we don’t actually experience anything first hand. Everything we experience and accept as “real and tangible” is first collected by the five senses; visual, olfactory, auditory, touch and taste, this information transferred through a highly complex system of electro-chemical signals and reactions organized in the brain and referenced by our training to reflect an “image of reality”. This image to a large degree is a result of or perceptions of the world which is shaped, taught and assigned us from the minute of our birth by our environment, parents and teachers and is in essence what the Hindu spiritual masters of long ago referred to as Maya or illusion.

Therefore, more accurate than theoretical, life is but a dream.